Domination, Subsistence, and Interdependence: Tracing Resource Claim Networks across Iceland’s Post-Reformation Landscape

Kong. Mayt. Tilsetter Commissarii á Islande, vid Arne Magnusson og Paall Jonsson Widalin, giörum hier med kunnigt, ad á medal annara erenda, sem hæhstnefnd Kongleg Maiestat ockur allra nádugast befalad hefur hier i lande ad utrietta, er ad samanntaka eina rigtuga og fullkomna jardabok yfer allt landed ... Þvi tilseigest hier med ollum og sierhvorum jardareigendum hier á lande, andlegum og veraldlegum, upp ad teikna allar sijnar jarder, med þeirra dijrleika, landskulld og kugildum, item hiaaleigur og búder, þar sem þær eru.

- Árni Magnússon, Embedsskrivelser, (1916: 20–21)

In the above passage, Árni Magnússon and Páll Vídalin declare their intention to produce ‘the most perfect‘land use survey of Iceland‘s early eighteenth century society. Their subsequent efforts can hardly be faulted. Over the next 13 years they travelled across the country gathering Iceland‘s community of farmers and recorded their accounts of farming practices, farm valuation, rent, livestock, quarrels over contested lands, nearby antiquities and a wealth of other information to compile the survey that would become known as Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalín (for a detailed account of the content see Pálsson 2018; Guðmundsson 1993). The descriptions not only detail the affordances of the farmsteads themselves, but also any claim that a farmstead had on the resources of other farms. These claims, called ítök, suggest an agricultural society both highly interconnected and interdependent. The claims have not been explored at a scale that reveals the extent of this connectedness. In this paper I consider ítök in their entirety as they were recorded in the early eighteenth century. Due to the complexity of these claim systems it is not my intention to examine them diachronically at this stage, but Magnússon and Vídalin’s highly detailed census in the early eighteenth century affords the best opportunity to study the breadth of these resource claims. I begin with a brief description followed by a characterisation of these claims. I conclude with with a discussion of their implications.

Hin Rigtuga Og Fullkomna Jarðabók

“The correct and complete land census”

The methodology of Jarðabók is outlined in a document signed by the two surveyors at Öxará, 18.7.1702 (Magnússon 1916: 21), and was to include information on the ownership, value, tithe, property tax, rental fees, livestock numbers, tenant farms and seafaring operations, pasture and grassland quality, environmental resources, access to external resources along with other related information. The survey was part of a larger programme to document land use, living conditions, population, and livestock numbers undertaken by the Danish king in response to a call for assistance by the Icelandic parliament Alþingi after a series of harsh winters at the end of the seventeenth century (Guðmundsson 1993: xix). The land survey covers almost the entire country – the records for the four easternmost counties were lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728, leaving records for 3560 of the roughly 4000 primary farms in the country (Table 1).

Table 1 The structure and contents of an entry in the early eighteenth century land census Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar & Páls Vídalín

The items listed for every farm in the census. Paragraphs are always ordered in the same manner and a single paragraph is devoted to a single element of information: entries begin with the name of the farm; the first paragraph notes religious structures (if present), the second notes ownership, and so on.

These farmsteads, known as lögbýli, were the social units through which Iceland’s administrative landscape was organized, and their status as such was neither gained nor lost easily. Fishing stations, trading sites, and harbour sites developed within a fixed structure of farmsteads that kept urbanization in check and under the control of Iceland’s elite – the landowners (Karlsson 2000; for a discussion of village and community formation in Iceland, see Vésteinsson 2006). The lögbýli formed the core of Icelandic society from at least as early as the eleventh century (Gunnarsson 1987). The right to vote, the right to marry and a host of others were dependent on whether an individual was associated with a farmstead; only the primary tenant or owner of a farm was allowed to vote at assemblies and, in several circumstances, to marry (Gunnarsson 1987: 18–19). While the settlement structure expanded with additional farms, fishing stations, monasteries, and proto-industrial enterprises, these were always considered subsidiary units of a recognized lögbýli. On the surface, this society appears, then, to consist of atomized farmsteads in a fairly flat hierarchy; in fact, however, these farms were interconnected and interdependent in a multitude of ways, among them the ítök.

Ítök: Background

Eighteenth century Icelandic society was agricultural, comprised of farmers on fairly small, individuated farms that relied on the land for various resources to feed their livestock, construct their houses, and provide cooking and heating fuel. A shortcoming of any of these required dealings with those who had a surplus of needed resources. The ítak system is a manifestation of these characteristics.

Since Iceland‘s agricultural landscape is highly variegated, with farms located on the coastline and valley bottoms, and well into highland areas. Thus a farmstead, by virtue of its location, would have lacked certain environmental resources, and certain farmsteads may have a surplus of some resources while lacking others. In addition, a number of environmental resources were necessary to keep a farmstead operational.

Iceland never developed an agronomy based on cereal cultivation, although there is evidence for early reliance on the practice (Steindórsson 1948). Rather, Icelandic farmers primarily reared sheep, horses, and cattle, and occasionally goats, although earlier farming practices were notably different, including, for instance, pigs (Amorosi et al.1997; McGovern et al.2007; Vésteinsson et al.2002). Sheep and horses require more or less the same kind of feed, and both were kept outdoors for most of the year although hay fodder was required for severe weather conditions. Sheep also grazed seaweed through the winter in certain parts of the country, notably in the north east and the western counties of Dalasýsla and Barðastrandarsýsla. Cows require more fodder and were kept close to the farm, or taken to shielings for a number of weeks in the summer. Practically every farm in the country had a mixture of these three livestock, and so would have required productive infields for cow grazing and hay making, meadows for hay, and outfield pastures for summer and winter grazing.

Many farmsteads also supplemented their food production with fish. Dried stockfish was also a common trade good, and hence important to fund purchases of essential goods that were not produced locally, such as whetstones, ropes, and iron tools (Gunnarsson 1987: 52–53). The majority of farmsteads did not have access to good landing sites by the sea, and so had to negotiate access with those farmers who had. Certain areas also developed into fishing stations for whole communities, such as Hjallasandur in Snæfellsnes. More commonly, though, farms with good natural harbours sold or traded access to them to individuals who constructed boathouses and sent farmhands to row out before the harvesting season.

Farmsteads also required a source of fuel, which is recorded in the land census for the majority of the approximately 3600 farmsteads listed. The two most common were wood charcoal and peat. Some coastal farms used driftwood or seaweed, and those without access to any of the above resorted to livestock manure for fuel. The census indicates that the last two were the least efficient (e.g., Magnússon and Vídalín 1913-1943 III: 26–34), and recent research on seaweed (Mooney 2018) shows how poorly it performs as a fuel source.

Most farmstead structures at the time were made using three main materials: timber, turf, and sod. A typical house consisted of thick outer walls of sod lined with turf on both sides, sometimes laid on a stone foundation. Inside, a timber frame supported a roof made of branches, beams, and turf strips. Lighter timber, skins, or textiles could then be used to segment the internal space of the house (Ágústsson 1998).

Iceland had lost much of its native woodland by the eighteenth century (Þórhallsdóttir 2001), and in any case the native Betula pubescens was not very well-suited to the typical internal frame of a turf house. Instead most houses were built with driftwood, with native wood species used for roofing and insulation (Fig. 1). The best areas for driftwood were the northern shores and in particular the north western and north eastern extremes, where driftwood primarily from Siberia settled (Eggertsson 1993). By contrast, Iceland‘s settlement reached far inland (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1

Driftwood collection prospects

Fig. 2

Farm settlement pattern and valuation in the nineteenth century

The Assessment of Driftwood Prospects in the Census

Early Eighteenth-Century Settlement in Iceland

Turf was easier to access for most of the farmsteads in the early eighteenth century, but it is by no means trivial. Ideal building turf comes from mires as sedge grasses, particularly Carex nigra, form a dense root structure that does not crumble once the turf dries (Stefánsson 2013: 17). While most farmsteads had access to wetlands – certainly a higher number than those with ready access to driftwood – hundreds of farms did not and thus relied on nearby farms for the resource (Fig. 3). As I illustrate below, the resource claim system is overwhelmingly designed to ensure access to these resources.

Fig. 3

Resource claims in the eighteenth century

Iceland had a somewhat unusual economy throughout the middle ages and early modern periods, with no minted money aside from insubstantial amounts of Danish coin in circulation (Karlsson 2000). However, while it is true that Iceland did not have a monetary economy until well into the nineteenth century, there was a well-established system of valuation that, at least in the eighteenth century was ubiquitous throughout the country. This system was hexagesimal, equating one cow to six sheep, 120 ells (roughly a metre each) of woven wool, and 240 kg of fish. It system operated very much like a monetary system; as Graeber (2011) argues, money is in some ways simply a mathematical abstraction of the relative prices of things, although societies without currency tend to rely on debt rather than direct exchange, and there is evidence that medieval Iceland fits that model.² What is more important for the purposes of this paper is that Iceland had barely anything that could be called an open market for domestic trade.

The Danish crown kept a monopoly on foreign trade in the early eighteenth century, but the merchants at these market harbours traded imported goods for local produce (Gunnarsson 1987). Anyone looking to trade one domestic good for another could have found potential trading partners at these harbours; a mid-eighteenth century account notes that during the annual sorting of sheep brought down from the uplands at the end of summer, a number of people from coastal settlements brought dried fish and other goods and that the sheep fold formed “something resembling a market“(Ólafsson and Pálsson 1974: 105). In addition, early thirteenth century references to price standardization and laws regulating the length of units of spun wool (is. vaðmál) show that trade took place at assemblies.³ It is not unreasonable to assume that similar practices occurred at the market harbours. Neither it is unreasonable to assume that people used the opportunity afforded by communal events to trade goods. This has yet to be conclusively borne out in the archaeological record, however, although the only investigation to date is Mehler’s (2015) investigation of trade practices at the national assembly site at Þingvellir, where she makes a strong argument that trade did not play a significant role.

I suggest that a good deal of domestic trade was negotiated directly between one farm and another, although third party mediation, usually from large landholders, was common. I discuss the evidence we have for such instances of mediation below, but for now I wish to stress that the lack of marketplaces where farmers were able to purchase required portable goods like firewood and building timber led to specific arrangements of exchange. Moreover, as indicated above, many of the required resources such as pasture and turf cutting, were not durable and could not be stockpiled easily.

Every resource claim listed in Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar & Páls Vídalín.

Ítök: Overview

There are 1963 claims listed for the 3556 farmsteads in Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar & Páls Vídalín, or roughly two claims for every three farms (Fig. 3). The distribution by county varies considerably (Table 2). At one end, the total number of claims in Barðastrandarsýsla is only 14% of the number of farms in the county, whereas it is 128% in Norður-Þingeyjarsýsla. This might due to differences in recording methodologies among the different counties or a variation in thoroughness. For instance, there is a positive correlation between the length of a description, averaged per county, and the number of claims listed.⁴ The longer the description, the more likely it is to include references to resource claims. It is also possible that these differences are due to regional variation, although that is beyond the scope of this paper.

Table 2 The number of claims and farmsteads ordered by county

Distribution of Farmstead Claims

Two hundred and eleven of the 1963 claims are relict. Many of these have become disused for two reasons. Firstly, a claimed resource may have been used up by the early eighteenth century. In addition, many claims simply involved too much effort to exercise. It is interesting to note that the claims are listed regardless and dated roughly to when they were last enacted. This temporal phasing in the Jarðabók text is divisible into four phases: now, recently, in living memory, and before living memory. The last phase indicates that many of these claims were written down, mostly in church inventories (is. máldagi). The claims were recorded at gatherings where every farmer in a given community was expected to be present in order to ensure that a farmer‘s description of his or her lands could be verified by neighbouring farmers, and disputes certainly occurred. Some claims were dormant as a consequence of being contested by a landowner, and the assemblies did not always pick sides. The more common reason for disputes was a discrepancy between the information in church registers and what the assembly of farmers considered to be accurate. For instance, the priest at Stafholt in western Iceland insisted that the parish church had fishing rights to the nearby river Þverá, based on church records dating back to the twelfth century and repeatedly listed in later documents. The farmers by the river, however, disputed the claim and the surveyors noted that the claim had rarely been exercised in living memory (Magnússon and Vídalín 1913-1943, IV: 333–335). Disputes of this kind indicate that Icelandic society had a form of adverse possession whereby anyone using a resource uncontested for 20 years would gain rights to it, and anyone who failed to exercise their claim for 20 years would lose rights to it (e.g., Kristjánsson 1980: 224).

The land census was conducted in a transitional period where written sources were clearly considered legitimate evidence for claims, but there are plenty of cases where local farmers express displeasure about these due to continued disuse. Many of the written sources have also clearly been copied from older church registers, and so the claims described in them may not have been used for centuries. Nevertheless, it is tempting to think that continuing to assert the legitimacy of claims had some value, even if it was clear that they would never be exercised again. The claims represent a degree of control that one farm asserts over another, and perhaps that control could be leveraged in other ways than directly exercising the claim itself (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

The average distance of claims, ordered by resource type. Red bars indicate predominately marine and coastal resources while black bars indicate terrestrial resources

Characterising Connectivity

I propose a tentative categorisation of the claims that, while by no means mutually exclusive, reflect general trends in the dataset that lead to fairly useful divisions.

Coupled Subsistence

Roughly 350 of the claims represent some sort of exchange between two farms. These farms, totalling 274, are usually either contiguous neighbours or located nearby one another. The exchanges generally involved trades that align well with the variegated character of Iceland’s landscape. For instance, a coastal farm might have traded sea access on their land for pasture access from a neighbouring inland farm. There were many instances of farms with good meadows engaged in a resource exchange with farms that had good pastures. These binary systems could have arisen for a variety of reasons. They may indicate that the two farms in question formed a larger unit earlier, which was then divided into two or more properties. This was a common practice in Iceland, especially in the first few centuries of settlement (Vésteinsson and McGovern 2012). It may also be an example of the spreading of risk between two farms as a way of counteracting Iceland’s notoriously capricious environment and climate. The final, and most straightforward explanation is that this practice made eminent sense considering Iceland’s landscape. In any event, by the eighteenth century it is clear that a significant number of farms were tied to one or more neighbours through dynamics of symmetrical interdependence. Living off the land relied on coupling, both in order to extend by proxy the area of the farm to include all of the vital resources needed to survive, as well as hedging some risk in case of disaster.

It is worth exploring who owned these 274 farmsteads. The land census contains ownership information for every farmstead, including where the owner is based. I have mapped this as a network (Pálsson 2018) and categorised the ownership type into four categories - private, episcopal, royal and ecclesiastical ownership (Table 3). There is a statistically significant⁵ difference between exchange claims sorted by the four ownership types, with roughly 10% of the farmsteads owned by the king and either of the two bishoprics engaged in resource exchange, while only 5.5% and 5.9% of the farmsteads owned by churches and individuals, respectively. The bishoprics and Danish Crown were the three largest landowners in Iceland by a major margin throughout the post-Reformation period, with the Danish crown owning 632 farmsteads and the two bishoprics a combined 646 farmsteads. The 168 landholding church farms, in contrast, owned a combined 604 farmsteads, or 3.59 farmsteads each on average. The rest of the just over 1800 farms were owned by 904 individuals, or 2 farmsteads on average.⁶

Table 3 Properties by proprietor type

The much more frequent occurrence of exchange claims in the royal and episcopal property assemblages suggests that, rather than being a practice between small landholders, exchange claims are predominately found as a mechanism employed by the larger landholdings more likely to have surplus resources to exchange to increase the sustainability of a number of its properties. It was a double bind for the tenant, however – not only did he or she have to pay rent, but had to also participate in this material dispersal across their landlord’s properties. There are recorded complaints about this type of obligation (see below).

Frequency of Exchange Claims on Farms Sorted by Ownership Category (Fig. 5)

Centre-Oriented Assemblages

This category includes more complex arrangements involving more than two farmsteads with several clusters of claims centred on a single farm. These centres were predominately large farmsteads that played an important role for much of Iceland’s history before the eighteenth century (and in many cases well into the present). An example of this is Holt in Rangárvallasýsla (Fig. 6). Holt is a large property, likely settled in Iceland’s settlement age in the ninth century (Buckland et al.1991). A thirteenth century church register lists its resource claims (Diplomatarium Islandicum II, pp. 84–86, translation by author):

The holy church of Holt owns … half of Syðstu-Vesturholt’s shores, same at Bakki, woodland in Þórsmörk … pasture in Vesturholt, pasture in Lambafell.

Fig. 5

Northern Iceland is characterised by a high number of resource exchanges between neighbouring farmsteads

Fig. 6

Claims centred on Holt

Holt Church Landholdings

These claims remain listed in the eighteenth century land census, although Holt had increased its claims somewhat. However, the main difference between the medieval church inventories and the eighteenth century land census is the number of claims that neighbouring lands had on Holt. Almost all of the neighbouring farms had a claim on Holt’s driftwood, and nearby Vesturholt had rights to turf cutting in Holt (Fig. 6). Holt was not only in a position to extract resources from nearby farms, but it also provides resources to its neighbours – most notably a supply of driftwood. This is not surprising given its historic role in the area as a magnate farm that quickly secured driftwood rights to significant stretches of the nearby coastline and woodland rights in the forests in the uplands to the north. It became the parish church when the parish system was established late in the twelfth century, and remained the largest farm in the region until at least the nineteenth century.

Holt also owned many of the farms that have driftwood claims on it, although not all of them. In fact, Holt owns the farmsteads by the sea, whereas the driftwood claimants that Holt does not own sit higher in the landscape, at the foot of the Eyjafjöll mountain range to the north. They are also considerably more valuable farms than Holt’s subsidiary properties. One suggestion for this arrangement is that Holt and the farms to the north were initially part of one large land claim, reminiscent of the so-called Skallagrím effect, named after the colonizing party that claimed a vast area in western Iceland and positioned farmsteads in strategic locations near key resources, while maintaining the farmstead Borg as a central place within the land claim (Smith 1995; Vésteinsson et al.2002). According to that interpretation, Holt may have been the centre of an internally coordinated area including the northern farms of Núpur, Yzti Skáli, Miðskáli, and Ásólfskáli, from which the sourcing and dispersal of driftwood for every farm in the area was organized.

It is also possible to think of the Holt assemblage as a scaled-up version of the first category. In fact, the driftwood claims of the southern farms Nýibær, Bakki, and Vesturholt is something of an accounting trick. In fact, Holt actually owned driftwood rights to the entire shoreline of these farms, which consequently had limited claims to driftwood on their land, and the land census records these as claims by Nýibær, Bakki and Vesturholt on Holt. Setting aside the awkward wording, the agency of resource control lay predominately with Holt. The other exchange that took place between Holt and its neighbours to the north resembles even more closely a version of the coupled subsistence category, whereby one side – Holt and its subsidiaries – control a coastal resource, while the other – the moderately large farmsteads positioned at the foot of Eyjafjöll – control an upland resource.

Ölfus landholdings.

Ölfus Resource Dispersal

Although a thorough discussion of these assemblages is beyond the scope of this paper, I note a few more to illustrate their variety. In some cases there was not a clear central farm to speak of. The farmsteads along the southern coast by Ölfus were connected by several two-way resource exchange claims. By scale they do not quite fit into the first category, but again the function is quite similar. The Ölfus case may have formed early, although there are unfortunately no written records that mention these claims before the eighteenth century. Whether it developed out of an initial land claim or not, it is clear that by the eighteenth century the Ölfus farms had developed an extensive system of resource dispersal involving eight farms (Fig. 7 and Table 4). Similar to Holt, this is a picture of terrestrial and marine resource exchange, but flowing in an irregular fashion in contrast to the barycentric flows of the Holt example.

Fig. 7

Resource claims in Ölfus

Table 4 Resource claims in Ölfus

Other cases centred on a resource rather than a farmstead. At the smaller end of the scale, a valuable resource may have been managed cooperatively by a number of nearby farmsteads. The cascades Laxfoss in Laxá í Kjós, still famous for its salmon fishing, was managed by five farmsteads, three of which had access to it once a week and the other two twice a week. It is interesting to note that these farmsteads did not include all those whose land borders the river nor does the influential nearby church farm Meðalfell have any claims to Laxfoss (Fig. 8). In other words, two key assumptions in historical network reconstruction – proximity and social influence (see Brughmans 2013, 629–630) do not appear to be primary drivers behind the formation of the Laxfoss resource network.

Fig. 8

Laxfoss and its claimants

Commons (is. Almenningar) were found throughout the country and usually operated in one of two ways: some were owned by a single magnate farm and used at their discretion, often for a fee (akin to a common property regime, see Ostrom 1990); others were managed and/or used by farm communities (is. hreppur), the main example being upland summer grazing areas (is. afréttur), and subject to various restrictions recorded in Iceland’s law codes (e.g., Karlsson et al.1992: 321–324). Most of the farms in the southwest of Reykjanes peninsula produced charcoals in the same commons, and shared uplands were the norm across the country although in some instances the uplands were owned and leased out by magnate farms (e.g., Svínavatn in Húnavatnssýsla). These are similar phenomena to the resource-centric assemblages, but operating at a much larger scale.

Figure 9 shows a distribution, The distribution of farmstead centre-oriented assemblages, defined provisionally as those farmsteads with four or more claims on other properties combined with claims on the farmstead itself, is fairly even across the study area, with notable clusters in the north east and a somewhat higher density throughout the north. It is clear that the overwhelming majority of these farmsteads are the historic power centres in the country (Fig. 9). Over 75% of the farmsteads in question are parish church centres, influential farmsteads that dominated Iceland’s political landscape for most of its history (Fig. 10),⁷ reflecting the way that power influences land use.

Fig. 9

Centres of claim assemblages

Fig. 10

Centres of claim assemblages ordered by ecclesiastical status. Less than 2% (shown in blue) had no ecclesiastical affiliation

Distribution of farmstead centre-oriented assemblages.

Parish Church Farmsteads

Magnate/Semi-State Systems

Occasionally, centre-oriented systems grew so large in scale that they merit their own category. There were only a handful of these in eighteenth century Iceland. By far the largest were the two bishoprics, Skálholt and Hólar, followed by the royal stewardships centred on Bessastaðir in the south and the pre-Reformation properties of the monasteries, claimed by the Danish crown in the mid-sixteenth century (see Karlsson 2000). They operated both as the seat of their respective sees comprising over 2500 and 1500 farms respectively, as well as directly owning vast amounts of property (Hólar owned 344 properties in the early eighteenth century while Skálholt owned 309). Due to length considerations, I here present a brief summary of my current research on Skálholt from a systems perspective.

Skálholt was the spiritual and secular centre of roughly three quarters of the country, stretching clockwise from Langanes in the north east to Hrútafjörður in the north west. In addition to the vast amounts of rent and tithe that Skálholt generated from its parishioners and tenants, it played an important role in managing the wider landscape through a stewardship of resource claims. Skálholt had grazing rights for its animals on many of its nearby tenant farms and oversaw, through a network of bailiffs, the transport of driftwood from the shoreline to Skálholt to wherever the timber was needed (Grímsdóttir 2008).

Skálholt’s tenants were also connected through resource claims. In addition to frequent instances of tenant farmers exchanging one resource for another – most often meadow access for pasture access – certain farms acted as suppliers of limited resources to nearby tenants. This was an arrangement that was, at times, to the detriment of the supplier farm itself. For instance, the census record for the tenant farms Fell and Efstidalur in Árnessýsla indicate that woodland was being over utilized for charcoal making by nearby tenant farmers whose access appears to be sanctioned by the bishopric (Magnússon and Vídalín 1913-1943, II). Similar records suggest that resource access between tenant farmers regularly did not suit either party, often due to complicated logistics involved or to undue environmental pressures on fragile resources. These arrangements were arguably made to suit Skálholt’s wider interests instead, dispersing resources across its properties which often required significant output of unpaid labour from its tenant farmers.

Examples from the northern bishop in Skagafjörður show that episcopal tenant farmers facing a shortage of a vital resource could approach the bishop to address this shortage, likely through his bailiffs. For instance, Hóll in Norður-Þingeyjasýsla in the north east of the country harvested hay in Keldunes, which the census records indicate was rather hard for the tenants to access, but Keldunes was the closest farmstead also owned by Skálholt (Magnússon and Vídalín 1913-1943, XI: 36). Similarly, the tenant farm Hraun í Fljótum (Magnússon and Vídalín 1913-1943, IX: 339) did not have adequate turf. It did not trade with any of its neighbours, however. Instead, the tenants travelled south to Hamrar, which according to the text is an arduous journey that takes over a week every year. The reason for this unlikely source of turf is that the arrangement was been made by Hólar’s bailiff in the region. It is likely that Hamrar was the closest farm owned by the bishop that had an abundance of turf. Whether or not that was the case, the broader point is that this particular arrangement did not arise from a logical interaction between neighbours, but from the decision-making of a regional power, most likely benefiting the entire assemblage of properties under the bishopric, even if it led to a particularly cumbersome arrangement for the tenants at Hraun.

Discussion: An Enchainment of Scales

Ítak Categories Ordered to Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales

I have presented the Icelandic ítak as a series of overlapping networks, and shown that in the absence of a fixed, market infrastructure for domestic trade, farmers in eighteenth century Iceland relied on negotiated access to resources on other farms, in arrangements that often lasted generations. Eighteenth century Iceland was an agricultural society of individuated and dispersed farmsteads that were nevertheless highly interdependent. Taking a cue from Knappett (2013), I’ve ordered the ítak categories suggested here according to three scales – the micro, meso, and macro (Fig. 11). I should emphasise that the phenomena at these different scales are by no means distinct or independent. As noted earlier, the simplest resource claim category – the coupled subsistence – is most commonly found as a feature of the semi-state systems managed by the two bishoprics and the Danish crown.

Fig. 11

The relationship between claim assemblages at different scales

It is rather that these categories are enchained across scales. Site to site interaction through shared and claimed resources traverse the scales from binary engagements to large systems spanning the entire island. As farmsteads interact at ever larger scales, we see an emergence of mechanisms needed to effect material flows involving long distances and several agents. The fundamental role of the ítak (pl. ítök) remains relatively unchanged, however. It is just that as resource claims articulate at ever greater scales, they begin to show more complex forms. These three scales are enchained, as any given resource claim interaction may be influenced by patterns taking place at other scales. Moreover, these resource claims are highly dependent on other site to site interactions – property networks, community networks, trade networks, and so on. For that reason, the resource claim networks cannot be fully understood without reference to other socio-dynamics. But by focusing on one dimension of connectivity it is possible to begin to build toward an interpretation of a farmstead site with full awareness of its high degree of connectivity, and to move, step by step, toward a release from proximity.